Preparation for Worship
- Something green. Christian worship has different seasons throughout the year. We are in the season after Pentecost. The color green represents this time communicating growth and discipleship. Add some green to your worship area with cloth, paper, or plants.
- Two candles. Our worship begins with the light of two candles: one represents Christ’s humanity and the other represents Christ’s divinity.
- Something to eat and drink to celebrate communion. The type of food and drink does not matter for they are merely symbols which help us celebrate the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
- Typically, each week we have the option to hear the scriptures being read by one another, but not this Sunday. (It’s just been too busy a week for us to get that together.)
The Worship of God
Invitation. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus provides another agricultural parable about the reign of God using the imagery of wheat and weeds. Both weeds and wheat grow together in the world and may look similar to one another, but in the end, they will be sorted and dealt with accordingly. Jesus highlights that this separation does not happen until the seeds have borne fruit. It is important to approach the text with caution, as it has the potential to harm and hurt by drawing lines between “insiders” and “outsiders.” There is mystery in how God plants, nurtures, and weeds to secure a harvest of promise, and we are invited into hope-filled trust in God.
Light two candles in recognition of Christ’s presence. In our practice, one candle represents Jesus’ divinity and the other Jesus’ humanity.
Gathering for Worship
Passing the Peace
Say to one another, “May the Peace of Christ be with you.”
Respond by saying, “And also with you.”
Call to Worship
O God, you know us inside and out, through and through.
You search us out and lay your hand upon us.
You know what we are going to say even before we speak.
We praise you, O God, for the wonderful knowledge
that whoever we are and wherever we go, you are with us.
Opening Prayer
God of all generations, as the author of the Psalm acknowledged your creative presence in such an intimate and personal way, so we affirm your presence with us in an even more wonderful and personal way – in the relationship established through Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit. We praise and thank you, O God, for reaching out to us and touching our lives in this way. We turn towards you in gratitude seeking to love as we have been loved and pray that this time of worship will be a worthy offering of praise and thanksgiving for the way you lay your guiding hand on our lives. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
Songs and Psalms of Praise and Prayer
Song of Praise
Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heav’n to earth come down!
Fix in us your humble dwelling,
All your faithful mercies crown:
Jesus, source of all compassion,
Love unbounded, love all pure;
Visit us with your salvation,
Let your love in us endure.
Breathe, O breathe your loving Spirit
Into ev’ry troubled breast;
Let us all in you inherit,
Let us find the promised rest:
Take away the love of sinning;
Alpha and Omega be;
End of faith, as its Beginning,
set our hearts at liberty.
Come, almighty to deliver,
Let us all your life receive;
Suddenly return, and never,
Nevermore your temples leave.
Lord, we would be always blessing,
Serve you as your hosts above,
Pray and praise you without ceasing,
Glory in your precious love.
(pause for key change in accompaniment)
Finish, then, your new creation,
Pure and spotless, gracious Lord:
Let us see your great salvation
Perfectly in you restored.
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heav’n we take our place,
Till we sing before the almighty,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.
A Reading from the Psalms
Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24
Lord, you have examined me.
You know me.
You know when I sit down and when I stand up.
Even from far away, you comprehend my plans.
You study my traveling and resting.
You are thoroughly familiar with all my ways.
There isn’t a word on my tongue, Lord,
that you don’t already know completely.
You surround me—front and back.
You put your hand on me.
That kind of knowledge is too much for me;
it’s so high above me that I can’t reach it.
Where could I go to get away from your spirit?
Where could I go to escape your presence?
If I went up to heaven, you would be there.
If I went down to the grave, you would be there too!
If I could fly on the wings of dawn,
stopping to rest only on the far side of the ocean—
even there your hand would guide me;
even there your strong hand would hold me tight!
If I said, “The darkness will definitely hide me;
the light will become night around me,”
even then the darkness isn’t too dark for you!
Nighttime would shine bright as day,
because darkness is the same as light to you!
Examine me, God! Look at my heart!
Put me to the test! Know my anxious thoughts!
Look to see if there is any idolatrous way in me,
then lead me on the eternal path!
Prayer for Others
Pause after each paragraph to give voice to prayers as prompted. [Additionally, if you would like our church family to pray for someone or something in particular this week, email the request to tonya@cullowheebaptist.com.]
Merciful God, who shelters us and guides us, we give you thanks for….
God who comforts, receive those who are fearful and lonely….
God whose love is steadfast, be refuge for the ill, the dying, and those who care about them.…
God of righteousness, we ask for your wisdom and ways of justice to prevail in our community, this nation, your world….
God who seeks our trust, grow us and guide us in your ways that are life-giving in your world. Amen.
Prayer in Song
When I’m Afflicted, Poor, and Low
When I’m afflicted, poor, and low, and light and peace depart,
my God beholds my heavy woe, and bears me on his heart.
I waited patient for the Lord, he bowed to hear my cry;
He saw me resting on his word, and brought salvation nigh.
He raised me from a horrid pit, where mourning long I lay,
and from my bonds released my feet, deep bonds of miry clay.
Firm on a rock he made me stand, and taught my cheerful tongue
to praise the wonders of his hand, in a new thankful song.
How many are thy thoughts of love! Thy mercies, Lord, how great!
We have not words nor hours enough, their numbers to repeat.
When I’m afflicted, poor, and low, and light and peace depart,
my God beholds my heavy woe, and bears me on his heart.
Celebrating Communion
A Reading from the Gospels
Mark 14:22-24
While they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” He took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.”
Share what you have to eat. Before eating, have someone say,
“This food represents the body of Christ. As we eat, we remember Jesus.”
Share what you have to drink. Before drinking, have someone say,
“This drink represents the covenant Christ made with us that our sins will be forgiven. As we drink, we remember Jesus.”
Prayer of Thanksgiving. Dear God, thank you for your abounding compassionate love. Thank you for guiding and leading us through these difficult times. Thank you for always being with us. Amen.
Song of Faith
Amazing Grace (NEW BRITAIN)
Amazing grace how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I am found,
was blind but now I see.
The Gospel Reading
A Reading from the Gospels
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like someone who planted good seed in his field. While people were sleeping, an enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat and went away. When the stalks sprouted and bore grain, then the weeds also appeared. The servants of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Master, didn’t you plant good seed in your field? Then how is it that it has weeds?’ “‘An enemy has done this,’ he answered. “The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and gather them?’ “But the landowner said, ‘No, because if you gather the weeds, you’ll pull up the wheat along with them. Let both grow side by side until the harvest. And at harvesttime I’ll say to the harvesters, “First gather the weeds and tie them together in bundles to be burned. But bring the wheat into my barn.'”
Jesus left the crowds and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.” Jesus replied, “The one who plants the good seed is the Human One. The field is the world. And the good seeds are the followers of the kingdom. But the weeds are the followers of the evil one. The enemy who planted them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the present age. The harvesters are the angels. Just as people gather weeds and burn them in the fire, so it will be at the end of the present age. The Human One will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all things that cause people to fall away and all people who sin. He will throw them into a burning furnace. People there will be weeping and grinding their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in their Father’s kingdom. Those who have ears should hear.”
Reflection on the Gospel from Jeffrey
Listen to Jeffrey’s reflection, “Both Weeds and Wheat” and/or read below.
Just about anyone who reads the things Jesus says in the four Gospels will recognize how often he talked about growing things in gardens or orchards. In fact, he uses agricultural metaphors in his parables and teachings so much that if someone were to tell me tomorrow that Jesus was not really a carpenter at all but a farmer, it would make so much more sense to me. I cannot remember a single thing Jesus mentioned about building something other than the kingdom of God, and there he was speaking metaphorically. Yet when it comes to farming, he knows his stuff. For example, Jesus talks about how to plow a straight line in a field in Luke 9:62. He discusses pruning vines in John 15:2. Jesus knows when to expect a fig tree to produce its fruit in Mark 11:22ff. And last week, in the Gospel reading for Tonya’s sermon, Jesus discussed sowing seeds in a field. It is not surprising, then, that this week’s parable from Matthew 13 also carries on the farming theme except this time Jesus takes on the weeds and the wheat. He moves the conversation from seeds to harvest.
Parables are never intended to be straightforward analogies. Something is always unexpected in a parable so that the listeners, or in our case the readers, are brought up short by the surprise. It was a way to remember the story—the sensational component of the parable helped folks remember it and so re-tell it. As we move from seeds to weeds with Jesus now discussing the growing season and harvest, Jesus’ audience recognizes that he’s talking about God’s perspective on humanity rather than best farming practices. You don’t ignore the weeds if you are a good farmer. But if you are a God whose mercy is deeply rooted in the ground of grace, you do. Thus while Jesus uses yet another agricultural metaphor, he’s making a point about our relationship to the Gospel, and God’s tendency toward mercy. Let me see if I can explain what I mean.
As I read this parable of Jesus, it seems to express one element of our human condition plus two applications for the Church. In brief the first point is that none of us have it all right. And the two practicalities for the Church are that the church is not solely holy, thus it is right to suspend our own judgment of others knowing that only God does so justly.
It is too simplistic to say that two kinds of people exist—one that is good and right, and another that is evil and unjust. In reality, we are mixtures of all these things even within our own selves. Sorting out a balance of these traits takes wisdom. Recognizing and purging the evil and unjust we choose and emphasizing more and more the good and right within our capacity is to mature as a person and grow in faith as a disciple of Jesus. I’m not the kind of theologian who thinks that all humans are born “totally depraved.” I argue against the Augustinian idea that Original Sin means that we are all sinners from the time we are born and thus are only deserving of punishment and death. Instead of repeating Augustine ad nauseum, I am closer to the Christian version of human sin often attributed to Pelagius that grows out of Genesis 1—that we are all born in “the image of God” as a “very good” part of God’s good creation. Our sin is an inevitability but also a series of choices. None of us are without sin, but sin is not the “normal” human condition. Thus it is part of the truth of the Gospel that Jesus exemplifies for us all the human possibility of obedience and righteousness. To live like Jesus in the hope of God’s world as God intended us to be within a holy community of forgiveness is the point of all his teachings, including these parables in Matthew 13.
If we ever wonder why all those annoying people, or even evil people, are not just zapped by God and taken away so that the rest of us, who clearly don’t deserve death by divine lightning strike, can go on making the world a better place, Jesus warns us that the targeted guilty may be standing right next to us, or it may not even be another person. No matter how wise we are, it is impossible to know who is deserving of life, and it is an act of human arrogance to the point of blasphemy to think that we can choose it for them.
Lest we forget, Jesus is also talking about the congregation of the church in this parable. It is not difficult to imagine that every congregation has some weedy Christians among the wheaty ones. I remember going with Tonya to a conference one year and a workshop for ministers was titled, “Ministry To and With Difficult Church Members.” I can honestly tell you that we did not feel the need to attend that one! At the same time, like every pastor I know, examples of church members who have not represented well the Gospel of Jesus, or the grace of God, or the hope of salvation lived among a holy gathering of Spirit-led people are part of the reality of the lived church. We are, nevertheless, together with our faults and failings, the body of Christ on earth. It is no wonder that we are called to follow God rather than obey the church, for sometimes we, the church, get it all wrong. Even with this reality, the purpose of the church is to include all of us, weeds and wheat, and let both grow in the same field, sharing the nutrients of the soil of the Gospel. To pull out the weeds is to threaten the wheat. Even to distinguish which one I am, weed or wheat, may change from time to time. It is hard, it turns out, for humans to know the difference in either ourselves or each other. In this way, Jesus is not calling us out for our sin, nor puffing us up for our holiness, but giving all of us permission to take a sigh of relief that judging the sins of others in the congregation of the church is not our job.
Even in the early days of the church, apparently during Matthew’s time around 80 CE in Antioch, these words were already necessary for they are part of what the gospel writer wanted that congregation to hear from Jesus. The church of Jesus’ followers by this time already diversified. The first followers of Jesus (fifty years before Matthew was written) were mostly Jews who heard and saw Jesus, witnessed the resurrection, and believed Jesus to be the Messiah. The congregation for whom Matthew was collecting the things Jesus said and did lived miles away from Jerusalem in Antioch, a huge city with a heavy Greek influence. Matthew’s church included both Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus. They almost surely were cautious and perhaps afraid since the Romans had destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem a few years before this was written. It is even likely that they no longer knew anyone alive who actually had seen or heard Jesus. But they also needed to hear that the church did not demand perfection among its followers. The church was not just for Jews, not just for the perfect, not only for the holy-like-Jesus ones. As it turns out, Jesus is easing the task of the congregation. It is not the responsibility of the church to weed out people, but to harvest us all.
The weeding, or as Jesus explains it, the judgement before God, is left to God alone. While we have too often had “the judgement of God” wielded like a weapon of our impending destruction, here the idea that God judges both the weedy and the wheaty is hopeful and encouraging. The great Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote convincingly that the image of God as just judge is one of the most important parts of the Hebrew scriptures. It is not hard to imagine, then, that when Jesus mentions God judging, the people of God are to find relief in his words. God will always judge rightly whereas our judgement will always prove imperfect. God knows the heart’s true condition whereas we flinch at the pain of the wounds we sometimes cause each other. God sees the good or evil inside whereas we judge only what we know and hear and feel.
These words of Jesus at the end of the parable are not doom and gloom, but goodness and truth. They do not signal an everlasting spiritual warfare of demonic and angelic powers hovering over our heads seeking to infiltrate and influence us for either good or bad. Such fanciful imaginations are informed more by the movies we see and the myths that we inherit than they are by the good news of these words of Jesus. I am convinced, that Jesus wants us even today to hear that we can go on and try to love and forgive each other. We can build a church that is always incomplete and imperfect without the need to eradicate all who err among us. Instead we love all who come and care and commit to the Gospel as best we can, and we take seriously the call to forgive one another, as we want others to forgive us, and as we have known forgiveness from God. After all, the unlovely often are those who need to experience genuine love; the crass and unkind are those who need to receive grace unmerited; the mistaken are those who need to feel forgiven by the people of the church in order to recognize the real forgiveness of God.
In this we find perfection in love, and humility in spirit as the way to be the body of Christ as the church. Let God be God and make good and just judgement. But let the church be bold and fearless in community. Let her attempt more than just what’s comfortable and convenient even if sometimes we make mistakes. We are all in God’s harvest, brother weed and sister wheat, and only God knows the difference.
Questions for Reflection
■ Who are some of the most important people to you that you have known because you were in church together?
■ How are being created as “good” and choosing to do what is right different?
■ What personal characteristics do we need to develop to get along with difficult people?
Prayer of Thanksgiving. Offer a prayer of thanksgiving for God’s love and ask God to help our church family grow deeper and deeper in love.
Song of Faith
Come Ye Thankful People Come
Come, ye thankful people, come,
raise the song of harvest home;
all is safely gathered in,
ere the winter storms begin.
God our Maker doth provide
for our wants to be supplied;
come to God’s own temple, come,
raise the song of harvest home.
All the world is God’s own field,
fruit as praise to God we yield;
wheat and tares together sown
are to joy or sorrow grown;
first the blade and then the ear,
then the full corn shall appear;
Lord of harvest, grant that we
wholesome grain and pure may be.
For the Lord our God shall come,
and shall take the harvest home;
from the field shall in that day
all offenses purge away,
giving angels charge at last
in the fire the tares to cast;
but the fruitful ears to store
in the garner evermore.
Even so, Lord, quickly come,
bring thy final harvest home;
gather thou thy people in,
free from sorrow, free from sin,
there, forever purified,
in thy presence to abide;
come, with all thine angels, come,
Sending
Go into this week knowing God’s hand is upon you,
blessing you and nurturing the life of Jesus within you
through the energy and power of the Holy Spirit.
Closing Song. In our tradition, we close worship by singing the first verse of Blest Be the Tie. Mindy starts us each week, and so she does today as well.
Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.
The fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above. Amen.
Credits: The Call to Worship, Opening Prayer, and Sending were written by Moira Laidlaw. Love Dinive, All Loves Excelling is set to the tune BEECHER composed by John Zundel and named after his pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. The words were written by Charles Wesley. The hymns are played by Tracy with his friend John. The words to When I’m Afflicted, Poor, and Low are based on Psalm 40. Words were written by Isaac Wyatts and composed by William Bradly Roberts. The CBC Social Distance choir this week includes Mindy, Ally, Tonya, Elizabeth, and Laura accompanied by Tracy on the piano and Tessa on the flute. Amazing Grace is set to the tune NEW BRITAIN from the Virginia Harmony, 1831. The words were written by John Newton (1807). The song was played by Aidan. Come Ye Thankful People Come is set to the tune ST. GEORGE’S WINDSOR and composed by George J. Elvey. The words were written by Henry Alford (1844). Blest be the Tie is set to the tune DENNIS which was composed by Johann G. Nageli (1836) and arranged by Lowell Mason (1872). The words were written by John Fawcett (1782). The hymn is sung by Mindy. Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-724755. All rights reserved. All writings have been used by permission from the posting sites or authors.
Cullowhee Baptist Church 
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